Vertigo

II All'estero

In October 1980 I travelled from England, where I had then been living for nearly twenty-five years in a county which was almost always under grey skies, to Vienna, hoping that a change of place would help me get over a particularly difficult period in my life. In Vienna, however, I found that the days proved inordinately long, now they were not taken up by my customary routine of writing and gardening tasks, and I literally did not know where to turn. Early every morning I would set out and walk without aim or purpose through the streets of the inner city, through the Leopoldstadt and the Josefstadt. Later, when I looked at the map, I saw to my astonishment that none of my journeys had taken me beyond a precisely defined sickle-or crescent-shaped area, the outermost points of which were the Venediger Au by the Praterstern and the great hospital precincts of the Alsergrund. If the paths I had followed had been inked in, it would have seemed as though a man had kept trying out new tracks and connections over and over, only to be thwarted each time by the limitations of his reason, imagination or will-power, and obliged to turn back again. My traversing of the city, often continuing for hours, thus had very clear bounds, and yet at no point did my incomprehensible behaviour become apparent to me: that is to say, my continual walking and my reluctance to cross certain lines which were both invisible and, I presume, wholly arbitrary. All I know is that I found it impossible even to use public transport and, say, simply take the 41 tram out to Potzleinsdorf or the 58 to Schònbrunn and take a stroll in the Potzleinsdorf Park, the Dorotheerwald or the Fasangarten, as I had frequently done in the past. Turning in to a coffee house or bar, on the other hand, presented no particular problem. Indeed, whenever I was somewhat fortified and refreshed I regained a sense of normality for a while and, buoyed up by a touch of confidence, there were moments when I supposed that I could put an end to the muted condition I had been in for days, and make a telephone call. As it happened, however, the three or four people I might have cared to talk to were never there, and could not be induced to pick up the receiver no matter how long I let the phone ring. There is something peculiarly dispiriting about the emptiness that wells up when, in a strange city, one dials the same telephone numbers in vain. If no one answers, it is a disappointment of huge significance, quite as if these few random ciphers were a matter of life or death. So what else could I do, when I had put the coins that jingled out of the box back into my pocket, but wander aimlessly around until well into the night. Often, probably because I was so very tired, I believed I saw someone I knew walking ahead of me. Those who appeared in these hallucinations, for that is what they were, were always people I had not thought of for years, or who had long since departed, such as Mathild Seelos or the one-armed village clerk Fürgut. On one occasion, in Gonzagagasse, I even thought I recognised the poet Dante, banished from his home town on pain of being burned at the stake. For some considerable time he walked a short distance ahead of me, with the familiar cowl on his head, distinctly taller than the people in the street, yet he passed by them unnoticed. When I walked faster in order to catch him up he went down Heinrichsgasse, but when I reached the corner he was nowhere to be seen. After one or two turns of this kind I began to sense in me a vague apprehension, which manifested itself as a feeling of vertigo.

The outlines on which I tried to focus dissolved, and my thoughts disintegrated before I could fully grasp them. Although at times, when obliged to lean against a wall or seek refuge in the doorway of a building, I feared that mental paralysis was beginning to take a hold of me, I could think of no way of resisting it but to walk until late into the night, till I was utterly worn out. In the ten days or so that I spent in Vienna I visited none of the sights and spoke not a word to a soul except for waiters and waitresses. The only creatures I talked to, if I remember correctly, were the jackdaws in the gardens by the city hall, and a white-headed blackbird that shared the jackdaws' interest in my grapes. Sitting for long periods on park benches and aimlessly wandering about the city, tending increasingly to avoid coffee houses and restaurants and take a snack at a stand wherever I happened to be, or simply eat something out of paper — all of this had already begun to change me without my being aware of it. The fact that I still lived in a hotel was at ever increasing variance with the woeful state I was now in. I began to carry all kinds of useless things around with me in a plastic bag I had brought with me from England, things I found it more impossible to part with as every day went by. Returning from my excursions at a late hour, I felt the eyes of the night porter at my back subjecting me to a long and questioning scrutiny as I stood in the hotel lobby waiting for the lift, hugging the bag to my chest. I no longer dared switch on the television in my room, and I cannot say whether I would ever have come out of this decline if one night as I slowly undressed, sitting on the edge of the bed, I had not been shocked by the sight of my shoes, which were literally falling apart. I felt queasy, and my eyes dimmed as they had once before on that day, when I reached the Ruprechtplatz after a long trail round the Leopoldstadt that had finally brought me through Ferdinandstrasse and over the Schwedenbrücke into the first district. The windows of the Jewish community centre, on the first floor of the building which also houses the synagogue and a kosher restaurant, were wide open, it being an unusually fine, indeed summery autumn day, and there were children within singing, unaccountably, "Jingle Bells" and "Silent Night" in English. The voices of singing children, and now in front of me my tattered and, as it seemed, ownerless shoes. Heaps of shoes and snow piled high — with these words in my head I lay down. When I awoke the next morning from a deep and dreamless sleep, which not even the surging roar of traffic on the Ring had been able to disturb, I felt as if I had crossed a wide stretch of water during the hours of my nocturnal absence. Before I opened my eyes I could see myself descending the gangway of a large ferry, and hardly had I stepped ashore but I resolved to take the evening train to Venice, and before that to spend the day with Ernst Herbeck in Klosterneuburg.

Ernst Herbeck has been afflicted with mental disorders ever since his twentieth year. He was first committed to an institution in 1940. At that time he was employed as an unskilled worker in a munitions factory. Suddenly he could hardly eat or sleep any more. He lay awake at night, counting aloud, his body was racked with cramps. Life in the family, and especially his father's incisive thinking, were corroding his nerves, as he put it. In the end he lost control of himself, knocked his plate away at mealtimes or tipped his soup under the bed. Occasionally his condition would improve for a while. In October 1944 he was even called up, only to be discharged in March 1945. One year after the war was over he was committed for the fourth and final time. He had been wandering the streets of Vienna at night, attracting attention by his behaviour, and had made incoherent and confused statements to the police. In the autumn of 1980, after thirty-four years in an institution, tormented for most of that time by the smallness of his own thoughts and perceiving everything as though through a veil drawn over his eyes, Ernst Herbeck was, so to speak, discharged from his illness and allowed to move into a pensioners' home in the town, among the inmates of which he was scarcely conspicuous. When I arrived at the home shortly before half past nine he was already standing waiting at the top of the steps that ran up to the entrance. I waved to him from the other side of the street, whereupon he raised his arm in welcome and, keeping it outstretched, came down the steps. He was wearing a glencheck suit with a hiking badge on the lapel. On his head he wore a narrow-brimmed hat, a kind of trilby, which he later took off when it grew too warm for him and carried beside him, just as my grandfather often used to do on summer walks. At my suggestion we took the train to

Altenberg, a few kilometres up the Danube. We were the only passengers in the carriage. Outside in the flood plain there were willows, poplars, alders and ash trees, allotment gardens and occasionally a little house raised on pillars against the water. Now and then we caught a glimpse of the river. Ernst let it all go by without venturing a word. The breeze that came in at the open window played about his forehead. His lids were half closed over his large eyes. When we arrived in Altenberg we walked back along the road a little in the direction we had come and then, turning off to the right, climbed the shady path to Burg Greifenstein, a medieval fortress that plays a significant part not only in my

own imagination but also, to this day, in that of the people of Greifenstein who live at the foot of the cliff. I had first visited the castle in the late 1960s, and from the terrace of the restaurant had looked down across the gleaming river and the waterlands, on which the shadows of evening were falling. Now, on that bright October day when Ernst and I, sitting beside each other, savoured that wonderful view,

a blue haze lay upon the sea of foliage that reaches right up to the walls of the castle. Currents of air were stirring the tops of the trees, and stray leaves were riding the breeze so high that little by little they vanished from sight. At times, Ernst was very far away. For minutes on end he left his fork sticking upright in his pastry. In the old days, he observed at one point, he had collected postage stamps, from Austria, Switzerland and the Argentine. Then he smoked another cigarette in silence, and when he stubbed it out he repeated, as if in amazement at his entire past life, that single word "Argentine", which possibly struck him as far too outlandish. That morning, I think, we were both within an inch of learning to fly, or at least I might have managed as much as is required for a decent crash. But we never catch the propitious moment. - I only know that the view from Burg Greifenstein is no longer the same. A dam has been built below the castle. The course of the river was straightened,

and the sad sight of it now will soon extinguish the memory of what it once was.

We made our way back on foot. For both of us the walk proved too long. Downcast we strode on in the autumn sunshine, side by side. The houses of Kritzendorf seemed to go on forever. Of the people who lived there not a sign was to be seen. They were all having lunch, clattering the cutlery and plates. A dog leapt at a green-painted iron gate, quite beside itself, as if it had taken leave of its senses. It was a large black Newfoundland, its natural gentleness broken by ill-treatment, long confinement or even the crystal clarity of the autumn day. In the villa behind the iron fence nothing stirred. Nobody came to the window, not even a curtain moved. Again and again the animal ran up and hurled itself at the gate, only occasionally pausing to eye us where we stood as if transfixed. As we walked on I could feel the chill of terror in my limbs. Ernst turned to look back once more at the black dog, which had now stopped barking and was standing motionless in the midday sun. Perhaps we should have let it out. It would probably have ambled along beside us, like a good beast, while its evil spirit might have stalked among the people of Kritzendorf in search of another host, and indeed might have entered them all simultaneously, so not one of them would have been able to lift a spoon or fork again.

We finally reached Klosterneuburg by way of Albrecht-strasse at the upper end of which there is a gruesome building banged together out of breezeblocks and prefab panels. The ground-floor windows are boarded up. Where the roof should be, only a rusty array of iron bars protrude into the sky. Looking at it was like witnessing a hideous crime. Ernst put his best foot forward, averting his eyes from this fearful monument. A little further on, the children inside the primary school were singing, the most appealing sounds coming from those who could not quite manage to hit the right notes. Ernst stood still, turned to me as though we were both actors on a stage, and in a theatrical manner uttered a statement which appeared to me as if he had committed it to memory a long time ago: That is a very fine sound, borne upon the air, and uplifts one's heart. Some two years previously I had stood once before outside that school. I had gone to Klosterneuburg with Clara to visit her grandmother, who had been taken into the old people's home in Martinsstrasse. On the way back we went down Albrechtstrasse and Clara gave in to the temptation to visit the school she had attended as a child. In one of the classrooms, the very one where she had been taught in the early 1950s, the selfsame schoolmistress was still teaching, almost thirty years later, her voice quite unchanged — still warning the children to keep at their work, as she had done then, and also not to chatter. Alone in the entrance hall, surrounded by closed doors that had seemed at one time like mighty portals, Clara was overcome by tears, as she later told me. At all events, when she came out she was in such a state of distress as I had never seen her in before. We returned to her grandmother's flat in Ottakring, and neither on the way there nor that entire evening did she regain her composure following this unexpected encounter with her past.

The St Martin's home is a large, rectangular building with massive stone walls dating from the seventeenth or eighteenth century. Clara's grandmother, Anna Goldsteiner, who was afflicted with that extreme kind of forgetfulness which soon renders even the simplest of everyday tasks impossible to perform, shared a dormitory on the fourth floor. Through the barred, deeply recessed windows there was a view down onto the tops of the trees on the steeply sloping ground to the rear of the house. It was like looking upon a heaving sea. The mainland, it seemed to me, had already sunk below the horizon. A foghorn droned. Further and further out the ship plied its passage upon the waters. From the engine room came the steady throb of the turbines. Out in the corridor, stray passengers went past, some of them on the arm of a nurse. It took an eternity, on these slow-motion walks, for them to cross from one side of the doorway to the other. How strange it is, to be standing leaning against the current of time. The parquet floor shifted beneath my feet. A low murmuring, rustling, dragging, praying and moaning filled the room. Clara was sitting beside her grandmother, stroking her hand. The semolina was doled out. The foghorn sounded again. A little way further out in the green and hilly water landscape, another steamer passed. On the bridge, his legs astride and the ribbons on his cap flying, stood a mariner, signalling in semaphore with two colourful flags. Clara held her grandmother close as they parted, and promised to come again soon. But barely three weeks later Anna Goldsteiner, who in the end, to her own amazement, could no longer even remember the names of the three husbands she had survived, died of a slight cold. At times it does not take much. For weeks after we learned of her death I could not put out of my mind the blue, half-empty pack of Bad Ischi salt under the sink in her council flat in Lorenz Mandi Gasse and which she would never now be able to use up.

Footsore from our walk, Ernst and I emerged from Albrechtstrasse onto the town square, which sloped slightly to one side. For a while we stood irresolute on the curb in the dazzling midday sun before trying, like two strangers, to cross the road amid the infernal traffic, almost being run down by a gravel truck. Once we were on the shady side of the street we dived into a bar. At first the dark that enveloped us as we entered was so impenetrable for eyes accustomed to the glare outside that we were obliged to sit down at the first table we came to. Only gradually and partially did our sight return and other people become apparent in the gloom, some of them bent low over their plates, others sitting curiously upright or leaning back, but all of them without exception on their own, a silent gathering, the shadow of the waitress threading among them, as if she were the bearer of secret messages between the several guests and the corpulent landlord. Ernst declined to eat anything, and instead took one of the cigarettes I offered him. A time or two he appreciatively turned the packet with its English wording in his hands. He inhaled the smoke deeply, with the air of a connoisseur. The cigarette, he had written in one of his poems, is a monopoly and must be smoked. So that it goes up in flames.

And, putting down his beer glass after taking a first draught, he observed that he had dreamed about English Boy Scouts last night. What I then told him about England, about the county in East Anglia where I live, the great wheatfields which in the autumn are transformed into a barren brown expanse stretching further than the eye can see, the rivers up which the incoming tide drives the sea water, and the times when the land is flooded and one can cross the fields in boats, as the Egyptians once did — all of this Ernst listened to with the patient lack of interest of a man who has long been familiar with every detail he is being told. I then asked if he would write something in my notebook, and this he did without the slightest hesitation with the ballpoint which he took from his jacket pocket, resting his left hand on the open page. His head to one side, his brow furrowed in concentration, his eyelids half-closed, he wrote:

England. England, as is well known, is an island unto itself. Travelling to England takes an entire day. 30 October 1980. Ernst Herbeck. — We left. It was not far now to the St Agnes home. When we parted, Ernst, standing on tiptoe and bowing slightly, took his hat from his head and with it, as he turned away, executed a sweeping motion which ended with him putting the hat back on; a performance which seemed to be, at the same time, both childishly easy and an astonishing feat of artistry. This gesture, like the manner in which he had greeted me that morning, put me in mind of someone who had travelled with a circus for many years.

The train journey from Vienna to Venice has left scarcely any trace in my memory. For what may have been an hour I watched the lights of the southwestern metropolitan sprawl pass by, till at length, lulled by the speed of the train, which was like an analgesic after the never-ending tramping through Vienna, I fell asleep. And it was in that sleep, with everything outside long since plunged into darkness, that I beheld a landscape that I have never forgotten. The lower portion of the scene was almost immersed in the approaching night. A woman was pushing a pram along a field track towards a group of buildings, on one of which, a dilapidated pub, the name Josef Jelinek was painted in large letters over the gabled entrance. Mountains dark with forests rose above the rooftops, the jagged black summits silhouetted against the evening light. Higher than them all, though, was the tip of the Schneeberg, glowing, translucent, throwing out fire and sparks, towering into the dying brightness of a sky across which the strangest of greyish-pink cloud formations were moving, while visible between them were the winter planets and a crescent moon. In my dream I was in no doubt that the volcano was the Schneeberg, any more than I doubted that the countryside, above which I presently rose through a glittering shower of rain, was Argentina, an infinitely vast and deep green pastureland with clumps of trees and countless herds of horses. I awoke only as the train, which for so long had been threading the valleys at a steady pace, was racing out of the mountains and down to the plains below. I pulled down the window. Swathes of mist were ripping past me. We were hurtling onwards at breakneck speed. Pointed wedges of blue-black rock thrust up against the train. I leaned out and looked upwards, trying in vain to make out the tops of the fearful formations. Dark, narrow, ragged valleys opened up, mountain streams and waterfalls threw up white spray in a night on the edge of dawn, so close that their cold breath against my face made me shiver. It occurred to me that this was the Friaul, and with that thought came naturally the memory of the destruction which that region had suffered some few months before. Gradually the daybreak revealed landslides, great boulders, collapsed buildings, mounds of rubble and piles of stones, and here and there encampments of people living in tents. Scarcely a light was burning anywhere in the entire area. The low-lying cloud drifting in from the Alpine valleys and across that desolated country was conjoined in my mind's eye with a Tiepolo painting which I have often looked at for hours. It shows the plague-ravaged town of Este on the plain, seemingly unscathed. In the background are mountains, and a smoking summit. The light diffused through the picture seems to have been painted as if through a veil of ash. One could almost suppose it was this light that drove the people out of the town into the open fields, where, after reeling about for some time, they were finally laid low by the scourge they carried within them. In the centre foreground of the painting lies a mother dead of the plague, her child still alive in her arms. Kneeling to the left is St Thecla, interceding for the inhabitants of the town, her face upturned to where the heavenly hosts are traversing the aether. Holy Thecla, pray for us, that we may be safely delivered from all contagion and sudden death and most mercifully saved from perdition. Amen.

When the train had arrived in Venice, I first went to the station barber's for a shave, and then stepped out into the forecourt of Ferrovia Santa Lucia. The dampness of the autumn morning still hung thick among the houses and over the Grand Canal. Heavily laden, the boats went by, sitting low in the water. With a surging rush they came from out of the mist, pushing ahead of them the aspic-green waves, and disappearing again in the white swathes of the air. The helmsmen stood erect and motionless at the stern. Their hands on the tiller, they gazed fixedly ahead. I walked from the Fondamenta across the broad square, up Rio Terrà Lista di Spagna and across the Canale di Cannaregio. As you enter into the heart of that city, you cannot tell what you will see next or indeed who will see you the very next moment. Scarcely has someone made an appearance than he has quit the stage again by another exit. These brief exhibitions are of an almost theatrical obscenity and at the same time have an air of conspiracy about them, into which one is drawn against one's will. If you walk behind someone in a deserted alleyway, you have only to quicken your step slightly to instill a little fear into the person you are following. And equally, you can feel like a quarry yourself. Confusion and ice-cold terror alternate. It was with a certain feeling of liberation, therefore, that I came upon the Grand Canal once again, near San Marcuola, after wandering about for the best part of an hour below the tall houses of the ghetto. Hurriedly, like the native Venetians on their way to work, I boarded a vaporetto. The mist had now dispersed. Not far from me, on one of the rear benches, there sat, and in fact very nearly lay, a man in a worn green loden coat whom I immediately recognised as King Ludwig II of Bavaria. He had grown somewhat older and rather gaunt, and curiously he was talking to a dwarfish lady in the strongly nasal English of the upper classes, but otherwise everything about him was right: the sickly pallor of the face, the wide-open childlike eyes, the wavy hair, the carious teeth. Il re Lodovico to the life. In all likelihood, I thought to myself, he had come by water to the città inquinata Venezia merda. After we had alighted I watched him walk away down the Riva degli Schiavoni in his billowing Tyrolean cloak, becoming smaller and smaller not only on account of the increasing distance but also because, as he went on talking incessantly, he bent down deeper and deeper to his diminutive companion. I did not follow them, but instead took my morning coffee in one of the bars on the Riva, reading the Gazzettino, making notes for a treatise on King Ludwig in Venice, and leafing through Grillparzer's Italian Diary, written in 1819. I had bought it in Vienna, because when I am travelling I often feel as Grillparzer did on his journeys. Nothing pleases me, any more than it did him; the sights I find infinitely disappointing, one and all; and I sometimes think that I would have done far better to stay at home with my maps and timetables. Grillparzer paid even the Doge's Palace no more than a distinctly grudging respect. Despite its delicately crafted arcades and turrets, he wrote, the Doge's palace was inelegant and reminded him of a crocodile. What put this comparison into his head he did not know. The resolutions passed here by the Council of State must surely be mysterious, immutable and harsh, he observed, calling the palace an enigma in stone. The nature of that enigma was apparently dread, and for as long as he was in Venice Grillparzer could not shake off a sense of the uncanny. Trained in the law himself, he dwelt on that palace where the legal authorities resided and in the inmost cavern of which, as he put it, the Invisible Principle brooded. And those who had faded away, the persecutors and the persecuted, the murderers and the victims, rose up before him with their heads enshrouded. Shivers of fever beset the poor hypersensitive man.

One of the victims of Venetian justice was Giacomo Casanova. His Histoire de mafuite des prisons de la République de Venise qu'on appelle Les Plombs écrite a Dux en Bohème l'année 1787, first published in Prague in 1788, affords an excellent insight into the inventiveness of penal justice at the time. For example, Casanova describes a type of garrotte. The victim is positioned with his back to a wall on which a horseshoe-shaped brace is mounted, and his head is jammed into this brace in such a way that it half encloses the neck. A silken band is passed around the neck and secured to a spool which a henchman turns slowly till at length the last throes of the condemned man are over. This strangulating apparatus is in the prison chambers below the lead roofs of the Doge's Palace. Casanova was in his thirtieth year when he was taken there. On the morning of the 26th of July, 1755, the Messergrande entered his room. Casanova was ordered to surrender any writings by himself or others that he possessed, to get dressed and to follow the Messergrande. The word "tribunal", he writes, completely paralysed me and left me only such physical strength as was essential if I were to obey. Mechanically he performed his ablutions and donned his best shirt and a new coat that had only just left the tailor's hands, as if he were off to a wedding. Shortly after he found himself in the loft space of the palace, in a cell measuring twelve feet by twelve. The ceiling was so low that he could not stand, and there was not a stick of furniture. A plank no more than a foot wide was fixed to the wall, to serve as both table and bed, and on it he laid his elegant silk mantle, the coat, inaugurated on so inauspicious an occasion, and his hat adorned with Spanish lace and an egret's plume. The heat was appalling. Through the bars, Casanova could see rats as big as hares scuttling about. He crossed to the window sill, from which he could see but a patch of sky. There he remained motionless for a full eight hours. Never in his life, he recorded, had the taste in his mouth been as bitter. Melancholy had him in its grip and would not let go. The dog days came. The sweat ran down him. For two weeks he did not move his bowels. When at last the stone-hard excrement was passed, he thought the pain would kill him. Casanova considered the limits of human reason. He established that, while it might be rare for a man to be driven insane, little was required to tip the balance. All that was needed was a slight shift, and nothing would be as it formerly was. In these deliberations, Casanova likened a lucid mind to a glass, which does not break of its own accord. Yet how easily it is shattered. One wrong move is all that it takes. This being so, he resolved to regain his composure and find a way of comprehending his situation. It was soon apparent that the condemned in that gaol were honourable persons to a man, but for reasons which were known only to their Excellencies, and were not disclosed to the detainees, they had had to be removed from society. When the tribunal seized a criminal, it was already convinced of his guilt. After all, the rules by which the tribunal proceeded were underwritten by senators elected from among the most capable and virtuous of men. Casanova realised that he would have to come to terms with the fact that the standards which now applied were those of the legal system of the Republic rather than of his own sense of justice. Fantasies of revenge of the kind he had entertained in the early days of his detention — such as rousing the people and, with himself at their head, slaughtering the government and the aristocracy — were out of the question. Soon he was prepared to forgive the injustice done to him, always providing he would some day be released. He found that, within certain limits, he was able to reach an accommodation with the powers who had confined him in that place. Everyday necessities, food and a few books were brought to his cell, at his own expense. In early November the great earthquake hit Lisbon, raising tidal waves as far away as Holland. One of the sturdiest roof joists visible through the window of Casanova's gaol began to turn, only to move back to its former position. After this, with no means of knowing whether his sentence might not be life, he abandoned all hope of release. All his thinking was now directed to preparing his escape from prison, and this occupied him for a full year. He was now permitted to take a daily walk around the attics, where a good deal of lumber lay about, and contrived to obtain a number of things that could serve his purpose. He came across piles of old ledgers with records of trials held in the previous century. They contained charges brought against confessors who had extorted penances for improper ends of their own, described in detail the habits of schoolmasters convicted of pederasty, and were full of the most extraordinary accounts of transgressions, evidently detailed for the delectation solely of the legal profession. Casanova observed that one kind of case that occurred with particular frequency in those old pages concerned the deflowering of virgins in the city's orphanages, among them the very one whose young ladies were heard every day in Santa Maria della Visitazione, on the Riva degli Schiavoni, uplifting their voices to the ceiling fresco of the three cardinal virtues, to which Tiepolo had put the finishing touches shortly after Casanova was arrested. No doubt the dispensation of justice in those days, as also in later times, was largely concerned with regulating the libidinous instinct, and presumably not a few of the prisoners slowly perishing beneath the leaden roof of the palace will have been of that irrepressible species whose desires drive them on, time after time, to the very same point.

In the autumn of his second year of imprisonment, Casanova's preparations had reached the stage at which he could contemplate an escape. The moment was propitious, since the inquisitors were to cross to the terra firma at that time, and Lorenzo, the warder, always got drunk when his superiors were away. In order to decide on the precise day and hour, Casanova consulted Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, using a system comparable to the Sortes Virgilianae. First he wrote down his question, then he derived numbers from the words and arranged these in an inverse pyramid, and finally, in a threefold procedure that involved subtracting nine from every pair of figures, he arrived at the first line of the seventh stanza of the ninth canto of Orlando Furioso, which runs: Tra il fin d'ottobre e il capo di novembre. This instruction, pinpointing the very hour, was the all-decisive sign Casanova had wanted, for he believed that a law was at work in so extraordinary a coincidence, inaccessible to even the most incisive thought, to which he must therefore defer. For my part, Casanova's attempt to plumb the unknown by means of a seemingly random operation of words and numbers later caused me to leaf back through my own diary for that year, whereupon I discovered to my amazement, and indeed to my considerable alarm, that the day in 1980 on which I was reading Grillparzer's journal in a bar on the Riva degli Schiavoni between the Danieli and Santa Maria della Visitazione, in other words near the Doge's Palace, was

the very last day of October, and thus the anniversary of the day (or rather, night) on which Casanova, with the words E quindi uscimmo a rimirar le stelle on his lips, broke out of the lead-plated crocodile. Later that evening I returned to the bar on the Riva and fell into conversation with a Venetian by the name of Malachio, who had studied astrophysics at Cambridge and, as shortly transpired, saw everything from a great distance, not only the stars. Towards midnight we took his boat, which was moored outside, up the dragon's tail of the Grand Canal, past the Ferrovia and the Tronchetto, and out onto the open water, from where one has a view of the lights of the Mestre refineries stretching for miles along the coast. Malachio turned off the engine. The boat rose and fell with the waves, and it seemed to me that a long time passed. Before us lay the fading lustre of our world, at which we never tire of looking, as though it were a celestial city. The miracle of life born of carbon, I heard Malachio say, going up in flames. The engine started up once more, the bow of the boat lifted in the water, and we entered the Canale della Giudecca in a wide arc. Without a word, my guide pointed out the Inceneritore Comunale on the nameless island westward of the Giudecca. A deathly silent concrete shell beneath a white pall of smoke. I asked whether the burning went on throughout the night, and Malachio replied: Si, di continuo. Brucia continuamente. The fires never go out. The Stucky flour mill entered our line of vision, built in the nineteenth century from millions of bricks, its blind windows staring across from the Giudecca to the Stazione Marittima. The structure is so enormous that the Doge's Palace would fit into it many times over, which leaves one wondering if it was really only grain that was milled in there. As we were passing by the facade, looming above us in the dark, the moon came out from behind the clouds and struck a gleam from the golden mosaic under the left gable, which shows the female figure of a reaper holding a sheaf of wheat, a most disconcerting image in this landscape of water and stone. Malachio told me that he had been giving a great deal of thought to the resurrection, and was pondering what the Book of Ezekiel could mean by saying that our bones and flesh would be carried into the domain of the prophet. He had no answers, but believed the questions were quite sufficient for him. The flour mill dissolved into the darkness, and ahead of us appeared the tower of San Giorgio and the dome of Santa Maria della Salute. Malachio steered the boat back to my hotel. There was nothing more to be said. The boat docked. We shook hands. I stepped ashore. The waves slapped against the stones, which were overgrown with shaggy moss. The boat turned about in the water. Malachio waved one more time and called out: Ci vediamo a Gerusalemme. And, a little further out, he repeated somewhat louder: Next year in Jerusalem! I crossed the forecourt of the hotel. There was not a soul about. Even the night porter had abandoned his post and was lying on a narrow bed in a kind of doorless den behind the reception desk, looking as if his body had been laid out. The test card was flickering softly on the television. Machines alone have realised that sleep is no longer permitted, I thought as I ascended to my room, where tiredness soon overcame me too.

Waking up in Venice is unlike waking up in any other place. The day begins quietly. Only a stray shout here and there may break the calm, or the sound of a shutter being raised, or the wing-beat of the pigeons. How often, I thought to myself, had I lain thus in a hotel room, in Vienna or Frankfurt or Brussels, with my hands clasped under my head, listening not to the stillness, as in Venice, but to the roar of the traffic, with a mounting sense of panic. That, then, I thought on such occasions, is the new ocean. Ceaselessly, in great surges, the waves roll in over the length and breadth of our cities, rising higher and higher, breaking in a kind of frenzy when the roar reaches its peak and then discharging across the stones and the asphalt even as the next onrush is being released from where it was held by the traffic lights. For some time now I have been convinced that it is out of this din that the life is being born which will come after us and will spell our gradual destruction, just as we have been gradually destroying what was there long before us. Thus it was that the silence which hung over the city of Venice that All Saints' morning seemed wholly unreal, as if it were about to be shattered, while I lay submerged in the white air that drifted in at my half-open window. The village of W., where I spent the first nine years of my life, I now remember, was always shrouded in the densest fog on All Saints' Day and on All Souls'. And the villagers, without exception, wore their black clothes and went out to the graves which they had put in order the day before, removing the summer planting, pulling up the weeds, raking the gravel paths, and mixing soot in with the soil. Nothing in my childhood seemed to possess more meaning than those two days of remembrance devoted to the suffering of the sainted martyrs and poor unredeemed souls, days on which the dark shapes of the villagers moved about in the mist, strangely bent-over, as if they had been banished from their houses. What particularly affected me every year was eating the Seelenwecken, the special rolls that Mayrbeck baked on those commemorative days only, precisely one apiece, for every man, woman and child in the village. These Seelenwecken were made of white bread dough and were so tiny that they could easily be hidden in a small fist. There were four to a row on the baking tray. They were dusted with flour, and I remember one occasion when the flour-dust that remained on my fingers after I had eaten one of these Seelenwecken seemed like a revelation. That evening, I spent a long time digging in the flour barrel in my grandparents' bedroom with a wooden spoon, hoping to fathom the mystery which I supposed to be hidden there.

On that first day of November in 1980, preoccupied as I was with my notes and the ever widening and contracting circles of my thoughts, I became enveloped by a sense of utter emptiness and never once left my room. It seemed to me then that one could well end one's life simply through thinking and retreating into one's mind, for, although I had closed the windows and the room was warm, my limbs were growing progressively colder and stiffer with my lack of movement, so that when at length the waiter arrived with the red wine and sandwiches I had ordered, I felt as if I had already been interred or laid out for burial, silently grateful for the proffered libation, but no longer capable of consuming it. I imagined how it would be if I crossed the grey lagoon to the island of the departed, to Murano or further still to San Erasmo or to the Isola San Francesco del Deserto, among the marshes of St Catherine. With these thoughts, I drifted into a light sleep. The fog lifted and I beheld the green lagoon outspread in the May sunshine and the green islets like clumps of herbage surfacing from out of the placid expanse of water. I saw the hospital island of La Grazia with its circular panoptic building, from the windows of which thousands of madmen were waving, as though they were aboard a great ship sailing away. St Francis lay face down in the water of a trembling reed-bed, and across the swamps St Catherine came walking, in her hand a model of the wheel on which she had been broken. It was mounted on a stick and went round in the wind with a humming sound. The crimson dusk gathered above the lagoon, and when I awoke I lay in deep darkness. I thought about what Malachio had meant by Ci vediamo a Gerusalemme, tried in vain to recall his face or his eyes, and wondered whether I should go back to the bar on the Riva, but the more I deliberated, the less was I able to make any move at all. The second night in Venice went by, then All Souls' Day, and a third night, and not until the Monday morning did I come round, in a curious condition of weightlessness. A hot bath, yesterday's sandwiches and red wine, and a newspaper I had asked for, restored me sufficiently to be able to pack my bag and be on my way again.

The buffet at Santa Lucia station was surrounded by an infernal upheaval. A steadfast island, it held out against a crowd of people swaying like a field of corn in the wind, passing in and out of the doors, pushing against the food counter, and surging on to the cashiers who sat some way off at their elevated posts. If one did not have a ticket, one had to shout up to these enthroned women, who, clad only in the thinnest of overalls, with curled-up hair and half-lowered gaze, appeared to float, quite unaffected by the general commotion, above the heads of the supplicants and would pick out at random one of the pleas emerging from this crossfire of voices, repeat it over the uproar with a loud assurance that denied all possibility of doubt, and then, bending down a little, indulgent and at the same time disdainful, hand over the ticket together with the change. Once in possession of this scrap of paper, which had by now come to seem a matter of life and death, one had to fight one's way out of the crowd and across to the middle of the cafeteria, where the male employees of this awesome gastronomic establishment, positioned behind a circular food counter, faced the jostling masses with withering contempt, performing their duties in an unperturbed manner which, given the prevailing panic, gave an impression of a film in slow motion. In their freshly starched white linen jackets, this impassive corps of attendants, like their sisters, mothers and daughters at the cash registers, resembled some strange company of higher beings sitting in judgement, under the rules of an obscure system, on the endemic greed of a corrupted species, an impression that was reinforced by the fact that the buffet reached only to the waists of these earnest, white-aproned men, who were evidently standing on a raised platform inside the circle, whereas the clients on the outside could barely see over the counter. The staff, remarkably restrained as they appeared, had a way of setting down the glasses, saucers and ashtrays on the marble surface with such vehemence, it seemed they were determined to all but shatter them. My cappuccino was served, and for a moment I felt that having achieved this distinction constituted the supreme victory of my life. I surveyed the scene and immediately saw my mistake, for the people around me now looked like a circle of severed heads. I should not have been surprised, and indeed it would have seemed justified, even as I expired, if one of the white-breasted waiters had swept those severed heads, my own not excepted, off the smooth marble top into a knacker's pit, since every single one of them was intent on gorging itself to the last. A prey to unpleasant observations and far-fetched notions of this sort, I suddenly had a feeling that, amid this circle of spectres consuming their colazione, I had attracted somebody's attention. And indeed it transpired that the eyes of two young men were on me. They were leaning on the bar across from me, the one with his chin propped in his right hand, the other in his left. Just as the shadow of a cloud passes across a field, so the fear passed across my mind that these two men who were looking at me now had already crossed my path more than once since my arrival in Venice. They had also been in the bar on the Riva where I had met Malachio. The hands of the clock moved towards half past ten. I finished my cappuccino, went out to the platform, glancing back over my shoulder now and then, and boarded the train for Milan as I had intended.

I travelled as far as Verona, and there, having taken a room at the Golden Dove, went immediately to the Giardino Giusti, a long-standing habit of mine. There I spent the early

hours of the afternoon lying on a stone bench below a cedar tree. I heard the soughing of the breeze among the branches and the delicate sound of the gardener raking the gravel paths between the low box hedges, the subtle scent of which still filled the air even in autumn. I had not experienced such a sense of well-being for a long time. Nonetheless, I got up after a while. As I left the gardens I paused to watch a pair of white Turkish doves soaring again and again into the sky above the treetops with only a few brisk wing-beats, remaining at those blue heights for a small eternity, and then, dropping with a barely audible gurgling call, gliding down on the air in sweeping arcs around the lovely cypresses, some of which had been growing there for as long as two hundred years. The everlasting green of the trees put me in mind of the yews in the churchyards of the county where I live. Yews grow more slowly even than cypresses. One inch of yew wood will often have upwards of a hundred annual growth rings, and there are said to be trees that have outlasted a full millennium and seem to have quite forgotten about dying. I went out into the forecourt, washed my face and hands at the fountain set in the ivy-covered garden wall, as I had done before going in, cast a last glance back at the

garden and, at the exit, waved a greeting to the keeper of the gate, who nodded to me from her gloomy cabin. Across the Ponte Nuovo and by way of the Via Nizza and the Via Stelle I walked down to the Piazza Bra. Entering the arena, I suddenly had a sense of being entangled in some dark web of intrigue. The arena was deserted but for a group of late-season excursionists to whom an aged cicerone was describing the unique qualities of this monumental theatre in a voice grown thin and cracked. I climbed to the topmost tiers and looked down at the group, which now appeared very small. The old man, who could not have been more than four feet, was wearing a jacket far too big for him, and, since he was hunchbacked and walked with a stoop, the front hem hung down to the ground. With a remarkable clarity, I heard him say, more clearly perhaps than those who stood around him, that in the arena one could discern, grazie a un'acustica perfetta, l'assolo più impalpabile di un violino, la mezza voce più eterea di un soprano, il gemito più intimo di una Mimi morente sulla scena. The excursionists were not greatly impressed by the enthusiasm for architecture and opera evinced by their misshapen guide, who continued to add this or that point to his account as he moved towards the exit, pausing every now and then as he turned to the group, which had also stopped, and raising his right forefinger like a tiny schoolmaster confronting a pack of children taller by a head than himself. By now the evening light came in very low over the arena, and for a while after the old man and his flock had left the stage I sat on alone, surrounded by the reddish shimmer of the marble. At least I thought I was alone, but as time went on I became aware of two figures in the deep shadow on the other side of the arena. They were without a doubt the same two young men who had kept their eyes on me that morning at the station in Venice. Like two watchmen they remained motionless at their posts until the sunlight had all but faded. Then they stood up, and I had the impression that they bowed to each other before descending from the tiers and vanishing in the darkness of the exit. At first I could not move from the spot, so ominous did these probably quite coincidental encounters appear to me. I could already see myself sitting in the arena all night, paralysed by fear and the cold. I had to muster all my rational powers before at length I was able to get up and make my way to the exit. When I was almost there I had a compulsive vision of an arrow whistling through the grey air, about to pierce my left shoulderblade and, with a distinctive, sickening sound, penetrate my heart.

Over the days that followed I was occupied more or less exclusively with my study of Pisanello, on whose account I had in fact decided to travel to Verona. It is many years now since the paintings of Pisanello instilled in me the desire to forfeit everything except my sense of vision. What appealed to me was not only the highly developed realism of his art, extraordinary for the time, but also the way in which he succeeded in creating the effect of the real, without suggesting a depth dimension, upon an essentially flat surface, in which every feature, the principals and the extras alike, the birds in the sky, the green forest and every single leaf of it, are all granted an equal and undiminished right to exist. It was this long-standing affection for Pisanello which took me once more to the Chiesa Sant'Anastasia to look at the fresco which he had painted over the entrance to the Pellegrini chapel in the year 1435. The Pellegrini chapel, in the left transept, is no longer what it once was. The archway has been closed up with boards of wood that have been painted brown in a careless manner; and there behind a door the verger has her retreat, or perhaps even the room in which she lives. At all events, it was into that room that the verger, a woebegone woman who had well-nigh faded away from long years of silence and solitude, disappeared without a word after she had unlocked the heavy iron-studded main door at a little past four o'clock and had led me, the sole visitor to the church, down the nave, wraithlike and somewhat unsteady on her feet. During the time I spent looking at the fresco she reappeared at regular intervals, as if she were making a perpetual circuit, venturing a little way off into the darkness, only to return again, as she completed her orbit, into her snug. Very little daylight enters the transept of Sant' Anastasia. Even on the brightest of afternoons, the profoundest gloom prevails. Pisanello's painting over the archway of the former chapel languishes deep in the shadows, but by dropping a thousand-lire coin into a metal box it can be illuminated for a certain period which can sometimes seem very long and sometimes extremely short. Then one sees St George setting off to fight the dragon, taking his leave of the principessa. All that remains in the left half of the painting is the somewhat faded monster and two as yet flightless young. Bones and skeletons of animals and humans sacrificed to placate the dragon lie strewn around. The vacancy into which the fragment dissolves still conveys something of the terror which, long ago, must have filled the people of the Palestinian city of Lydda, according to the legend. The right portion of the fresco, the other principal part, is almost completely preserved. A landscape of a more northerly character rises (the word is suggested by the nature of the depiction) into a blue sky. A ship with billowing sails, making headway on an inlet, is the only element in the composition hinting at remoteness and distance; everything else is very much of the present and of this world, the undulating land, the ploughed fields, the hedgerows and hills, the city with its roofs, towers and battlements, and — a favourite motif at that time — the gallows with the hanged men dangling from it, which paradoxically imparts something lifelike to the scene. The bushes, bosquets and foliage are painted meticulously, and the animals, to which Pisanello always gave the closest attention, are also rendered with great care: the stork flying inland, the dogs, the ram, and the mounts of the seven horsemen, among them a Kalmuck archer with a painfully intense expression on his face. In the centre of the painting is the principessa in a gown of feathers and St George, the silver of whose armour has peeled off, though his reddish gold hair still glows about him. It is astounding how Pisanello contrived to set the wide

open eyes of the knight, already wandering sideways to the hard and bloody battle ahead, against the self-contained expression of the woman indicated by little more than a slight

lowering of her gaze. On the third day of my stay in Verona, I took my evening meal in a pizzeria in the Via Roma. I do not know how I go about choosing the restaurants where I eat in unfamiliar cities. On the one hand I am too fastidious and wander the streets broad and narrow for hours on end before I make up my mind; on the other hand I generally finish up turning in simply anywhere, and then, in dreary surroundings and with a sense of discontent, select some dish that does not in the least appeal. That was how it was on that evening of the 5th of November. If I had heeded my first inclination, I would never have crossed the threshold of that establishment, which even from the outside made a disreputable impression. But now there I sat, on a kitchen chair with a cover of red marbled plastic, at a rickety table, in a grotto festooned with fishing nets. The decor of the floor and walls was a hideous marine blue which put an end to all hope I might have entertained of ever seeing dry land again. The sense of being wholly surrounded by water was rendered complete by a sea piece that hung right below the ceiling opposite me, in a frame painted a golden bronze. As is commonly the case with such sea pieces, it showed a ship, on the crest of a turquoise wave crowned with snow-white foam, about to plunge into the yawning depths that gaped beneath her bows. Plainly this was the moment immediately before a disaster. A mounting sense of unease took possession of me. I was obliged to push aside the plate, barely half of the pizza eaten, and grip the table edge, as a seasick man might grip a ship's rail. I sensed my brow running cold with fear, but was quite unable to call the waiter over and ask for the bill. Instead, in order to focus on reality once more, I pulled the newspaper I had bought that afternoon, the Venice Gazzettino, out of my jacket pocket and unfolded it on the table as best I could. The first article that caught my attention was an editorial report to the effect that yesterday, the 4th of November, a letter in strange runic writing had been received by the newspaper, in which a hitherto unknown group by the name of

claimed responsibility for a number of murders that had been committed in Verona and other northern Italian cities since 1977. The article brought these as yet unsolved cases back to the memories of its readers. In late August 1977, a romany named Guerrino Spinelli had died in a Verona hospital of severe burns sustained when the old Alfa in which he customarily spent the night on the outskirts of the city was set on fire by persons unknown. A good year later, a waiter, Luciano Stefanato, was found dead in Padua with two 25-centimetre stab wounds in the neck, and another year after that a 22-year-old heroin addict, Claudio Costa, was found dead with thirty-nine knife wounds. It was now the late autumn of 1980. The waiter brought me the bill. It was folded and I opened it out. The letters and numbers blurred before my eyes. The 5th of November, 1980. Via Roma. Pizzeria Verona. Di Cadavero Carlo e Patierno Vittorio. Patierno and Cadavero. -

The telephone rang. The waiter wiped a glass dry and held it up to the light. Not until I felt I could stand the ringing no longer did he pick up the receiver. Then, jamming it between his shoulder and his chin, he paced to and fro behind the bar as far as the cable would let him. Only when he was speaking himself did he stop, and at these times he would lift his eyes to the ceiling. No, he said, Vittorio wasn't there. He was hunting. Yes, that was right, it was him, Carlo. Who else would it be? Who else would be in the restaurant? No, nobody. Not a soul all day. And now there was only one diner. Un inglese, he said, and looked across at me with what I took to be a touch of contempt. No wonder, he said, the days were getting shorter. The lean times were on the way. L'inverno è alle porte. si, si, l'inverno, he shouted once more, looking over at me again. My heart missed a beat. I left 10,000 lire on the plate, folded up the paper, hurried out into the street and across the piazza, went into a brightly lit bar and had them call a taxi, returned to my hotel, packed my things in a rush, and fled by the night train to Innsbruck. Prepared for the very worst, I sat in my compartment unable to read and unable to close my eyes, listening to the rhythm of the wheels. At Rovereto an old Tyrolean woman carrying a shopping bag made of leather patches sewn together joined me, accompanied by her son, who might have been forty. I was immeasurably grateful to them when they came in and sat down. The son leaned his head back against the seat. Eyelids lowered, he smiled blissfully most of the time. At intervals, though, he would be seized by a spasm, and his mother would then make signs in the palm of his left hand, which lay in her lap, open, like an unwritten page. The train hauled onwards, uphill. Gradually I began to feel better. I went out into the corridor. We were in Bolzano. The Tyrolean woman and her son got out. Hand in hand the two of them headed towards the underpass. Even before they had vanished from sight, the train started off again. It was now beginning to feel distinctly colder. The train moved more slowly, there were fewer lights, and the darkness was thicker. Franzensfeste station passed. I saw scenes of a bygone war: the assault on the pass — Vall'Inferno — the 26th of May, 1915. Bursts of gunfire in the mountains and a forest shot to shreds. Rain hatched the window-panes. The train changed track at points. The pallid glow of arc-lamps suffused the compartment. We stopped at the Brenner. No one got out and no one got in. The frontier guards in their grey greatcoats paced to and fro on the platform. We remained there for at least a quarter of an hour. Across on the other side were the silver ribbons of the rails. The rain turned to snow. And a heavy silence lay upon the place, broken only by the bellowing of some nameless animals waiting in a siding to be transported onwards.

In the summer of 1987, seven years after I fled from Verona, I finally yielded to a need I had felt for some time to repeat the journey from Vienna via Venice to Verona, in order to probe my somewhat imprecise recollections of those fraught and hazardous days and perhaps record some of them. On this occasion in the midst of the holiday season, the night train from Vienna to Venice, on which in the late October of 1980 I had seen nobody except a pale-faced schoolmistress from New Zealand, was so overcrowded that I had to stand in the corridor all the way or crouch uncomfortably among suitcases and rucksacks, so that instead of drifting into sleep I slid into my memories. Or rather, the memories (at least so it seemed to me) rose higher and higher in some space outside of myself, until, having reached a certain level, they overflowed from that space into me, like water over the top of a weir. Once I had begun to write, the time passed more swiftly than I should ever have thought possible, and it was not until the train was rolling slowly from Mestre over the railway causeway, crossing the lagoon which stretched out on either side in the gleam of the night, that I came to. At Santa Lucia I was one of the last to get out. With my blue canvas bag slung as ever across my shoulder, I slowly walked down the platform to the station hall, where a veritable army of backpackers were lying on the stone floor in sleeping-bags on straw mats, close to each other like an alien people resting on their way through the desert. Out in the station forecourt, too, countless young men and women lay in groups or couples or singly, on the steps and all around. I sat on the Riva and took out my writing materials, the pencil and the fine-ruled paper. The red glow of dawn was already breaking over the eastward roofs and domes of the city. Here and there, sleepers stirred in the no man’s land where they had spent the night, propped themselves up and began to rummage through their belongings, eating a bite or drinking a little and then stowing it all carefully away again. Presently, bowed under heavy packs, which reached a full head above them, several began moving among their brothers and sisters still lying on the ground, as if they were preparing for the next stage of an arduous and never-ending journey.

I sat on the Fondamenta Santa Lucia until half the morning was gone. The pencil flew across the paper, and from time to time a cockerel crowed from its cage on the balcony of a house across the canal. When I looked up once again from my work, the shadowy forms of the sleepers on the station forecourt had all vanished, or had faded away, and the morning traffic had begun. At one point a barge laden with heaps of rubbish came by. A large rat scuttled along its gunnel and, having reached the bow, plunged head first into the water. I cannot say whether it was the sight of this that made me decide not to stay in Venice but to travel on to Padua instead, without delay, and seek out Enrico Scrovegni's Arena Chapel. Hitherto all I knew of it was an account that described the undiminished intensity of the colours in Giotto's frescoes, and the certainty which governs every stride and feature of the figures represented. Once I entered the chapel, from the heat that already prevailed in the city even in the early morning of that day, and stood before the three rows of frescoes that cover the walls up to the ceiling, I was overwhelmed by the silent lament of the angels, who have kept their station above our endless calamities for nigh on seven centuries. Their lament resounded in the very silence of the chapel and their eyebrows were drawn so far together in their grief that one might have supposed them blindfolded. And are not their white wings, I thought, with those few

bright green touches of Veronese earth, the most wondrous of all the things we have ever conceived of? Gli angeli visitano la scena della disgrazia — with these words on my lips I returned through the roaring traffic to the station, not far from the chapel, to take the very next train to Verona, where I hoped to learn something not only relating to my own abruptly broken-off stay in that city seven years before but also about the disconcerting afternoon, as he himself described it, that Dr K. spent there in September 1913 on his way from Venice to Lake Garda. After barely an hour of breezy travel, with the windows open upon the radiant landscape, the Porta Nuova came into view and as I beheld the city lying in the semicircle of the distant mountains, I found myself incapable of alighting. Strangely transfixed, I remained seated, and when the train had left Verona and the guard came down the corridor once more I asked him for a supplementary ticket to Desenzano, where I knew that on Sunday the 21st of September, 1913, Dr K., filled with the singular happiness of knowing that no one suspected where he was at that moment, but otherwise profoundly disconsolate, had lain alone in the grass on the lakeside and gazed out at the waves in the reeds.

The railway station at Desenzano, which cannot have been completed much before 1913 and which, at least externally, had changed little since, lay 'deserted in the midday sun when the departing train had shrunk to the size of the westerly vanishing point. Above the tracks, which ran towards the horizon in a straight line as far as the eye could see, the air shimmered. To the south were open fields. The station building, deserted though it seemed, gave a decidedly purposeful impression. Engraved in elegant lettering into the glass panels over the doors which faced the platform were the official designations of the station staff. Capo stazione titulare. Capo di statione superiore. Capi stazione aggiunti. Manovratori manuali. I waited in the hope that at least one representative of this bygone hierarchy, say, the stationmaster with a glinting monocle or a porter with a walrus moustache and long apron, would emerge from one of those doors and bid me welcome, but there was no sign of life. The building was deserted inside as well. For some time I wandered upstairs and down until I found the pissoir, where scarcely a thing had been altered since the turn of the century, as in the rest of the building. The wooden stalls in a military shade of green, the heavy stoneware basins and the white tiles had aged, were chipped and netted with hairline cracks, but otherwise everything was unchanged, except for the graffiti, all of which dated from the last twenty years. As I washed my hands I looked in the mirror and wondered whether Dr K., travelling from Verona, had also been at this station and found himself contemplating his face in this mirror. It would not have been surprising. And one of the graffiti beside the mirror seemed indeed to suggest as much. Il cacciatore, it read, in awkwardly formed letters. When I had dried my hands, I added the words nella selva nera.

Later on, I sat on a bench in the square outside the station for about half an hour, and had an espresso and a mineral water. It was good to sit in the shade, at peace in the middle of the day. But for a few taxi drivers dozing in their cabs and listening to their radios, there was no one in sight, until a carabiniere drove up, left his vehicle in the no parking zone immediately in front of the entrance, and disappeared into the station. When he emerged again, all the drivers got out of their taxis, as if at a signal, surrounded the somewhat undersized and slightly built policeman, whom they had perhaps known at school, and upbraided him on account of the illegal way he had parked. Barely had one said his piece but the next one began. The carabiniere could not get a word in, and whenever he tried he was promptly talked down. Helplessly, and even with a certain panic in his eyes, he stared at the accusing forefingers pointed at his chest. But since the entire performance merely served the taxi drivers as a timely diversion to dispel the midday boredom, their victim, for whom these accusations plainly went against the grain, could make no serious objection, not even when they set about faulting his posture and putting his uniform to rights, solicitously brushing the dust off his collar, straightening his tie and cap, and even adjusting his waistband. At length one of the drivers opened the police car door, and the guardian of the law, his dignity somewhat impaired, had no option but to climb in and drive off, tyres squealing, around the circle and down Via Cavour. The taxi drivers waved him off and stood around long after he was out of sight, reliving this or that part of the comedy, quite beside themselves with merriment.

Punctually, at a quarter past one, the blue bus I was to take to Riva arrived. I boarded it and took one of the seats in the middle. A few other passengers got on too, some of them locals, others travellers like myself. Not long before the bus departed at twenty-five past, a boy of about fifteen climbed aboard who bore the most uncanny resemblance imaginable to pictures of Franz Kafka as an adolescent schoolboy. And as if that were not enough, he had a twin brother who, so far as I could tell in my perplexed state of mind, did not differ from him in the slightest. The hairlines of both boys began well down their foreheads, they had the same dark eyes and thick brows, the same large and unequal ears, with the lobes growing into the skin of the neck. They were with their parents, and sat some way behind me. The bus started off, down Via Cavour. The branches of the trees lining the avenue scraped on the roof. My heart pounded, and a vertiginous feeling came over me as it used to in my childhood, when any car journey would make me feel sick. I leaned my head against the window frame, in the breeze, and for a long time did not dare look around. Not until we had left Salò far behind and were approaching Gargnano was I able to master the fright which had frozen my limbs and glance back over my shoulder. The two lads had not vanished, as I had partly feared and partly hoped they would have, but were half concealed behind an outspread newspapers, the Siciliano. A while later, summoning up all my courage, I tried to get into a conversation with them. Their only response to this was to grin witlessly at each other. Nor did I have any success, when I approached their parents, an exceptionally reserved couple who had already been watching my strange advances to their sons with mounting concern, in order to explain what the nature of my interest in these two sniggering boys actually was. The story I told them about a scrittore ebreo from the city of Praga who took the waters at Riva in the month of September 1913 and as a young man looked exactly — esatto, esatto, I hear myself repeating in despair, time after time — like their two sons, who were now and then peeping maliciously out from behind the Siciliano, evidently struck them, so their gestures conveyed, as pretty much the most incomprehensible nonsense they had ever heard. When at length, to dispel any suspicions they might have regarding my person, I said that I should be perfectly happy if they would send me, without revealing their name, a photograph of their sons to my English address once they had returned home from their holiday to Sicily, I realised that they were now quite certain that I must be an English pederast travelling Italy for his so-called pleasure. They informed me in no uncertain terms that they would not under any circumstances comply with my improper request and that they would appreciate it if I would return to my own seat right away. I realised that, if I did not, they would have been prepared to stop the bus in the next village and hand over this nuisance of a fellow passenger to the authorities. Grateful for every tunnel we had to pass through on the steep west bank of Lake Garda, I remained motionless on that bus seat from then on, embarrassed to the utmost degree and consumed with an impotent rage at the fact that I would now have no evidence whatsoever to document this most improbable coincidence. Continually I heard the sniggering of the two lads behind me, and in the end it was affecting me so badly that, when the bus stopped in Limone sul Garda, I took my bag down from the luggage net and got out.

It will have been close on four in the afternoon when, weary and rather the worse for wear after the long journey from Vienna via Venice to Padua and then on to Limone, during which I had not slept at all, I entered the Hotel Sole on the lakeside, which at that time of day was deserted. One solitary visitor was sitting beneath a sunshade on the terrace, and inside, in the darkness behind the desk, stood the proprietress, Luciana Michelotti, also alone, jangling a small silver spoon absent-mindedly in an espresso cup that she had just drained. On that day, which as I later learned was her forty-fourth birthday, this woman whom I remember as resolute and zestful made a melancholy and even inconsolable impression. With a noticeable lack of urgency she dealt with my registration, leafing through my passport, perhaps intrigued at my being the same age as herself, repeatedly comparing my face with the photograph and at one point gazing long into my eyes, before finally locking the document carefully away in a drawer and handing me my room key I was planning to stay for several days, do some writing, and rest a little. In the early hours of the evening, having found a suitable boat in the harbour with the help of Lucianas son Mauro, I rowed a good way out onto the lake. On the westerly side, everything was already sinking into the shadows that billowed down the steep cliff faces of the Dosso dei Ròveri like dark curtains, and on the opposite east bank to the radiant evening light climbed the heights steadily, till all that could be seen was a pale pink glow over the peak of the Monte Altissimo. The whole of the darkly gleaming lake lay silently about me. The nocturnal noise of the loudspeakers on the hotel terraces and in the bars and discos of Limone, which had now begun, reached me as a mere dull pulsation, and seemed a negligible disturbance, measured against the huge bulk of the mountain that towered so high and steep above the quivering lights of the town that I thought it was inclining towards me and might tumble into the lake the very next moment. I lit the lamp in the stern of my boat and set myself rowing again, half towards the western shore and half against the cooling northerly breeze that passes over the lake every night. When I had reached the deep shadow of the rock wall, I shipped the oars, and drifted back slowly in the direction of the harbour. I extinguished the lamp, lay down in the boat and looked up into the vault of the heavens, where the stars were coming out over the glowering crags in such vast numbers that they appeared to touch one another. The rowing had left me aware of the blood coursing through my hands. The boat floated past the steep terraces of the derelict orchards where once upon a time lemons had been grown. In the darkness of these abandoned gardens, step by step scaling the heights stood hundreds of square stone pillars which once supported wooden cross-beams and the straw mats outstretched between them to protect the tender evergreen trees from the cold.

It was almost midnight in Limone when I got back into harbour again and walked round to my hotel. Holidaymakers were everywhere, in couples or family groups, a gaudy crowd moving like a cortège in procession through the narrow streets of the small resort locked between the lake and the sheer side of the mountain. Their sunburnt, painted faces swaying over the solid mass of their bodies were those of the wandering dead. Unhappy they seemed, every one of them, condemned to haunt these streets night after night. Back at my hotel I lay down on my bed and folded my arms under my head. There could be no prospect of sleep. From the terrace came the noise of the music and the confused blathering of the revellers, most of whom, as I realised with some dismay, were compatriots of mine. I heard Swabians, Franconians and Bavarians saying the most unsavoury things, and, if I found their broad, uninhibited dialects repellent, it was a veritable torment to have to listen to the loud-mouthed opinions and witticisms of a group of young men who clearly came from my home town. How I wished during those sleepless hours that I belonged to a different nation, or, better still, to none at all. Around two in the morning the music was turned off, but the last shouts and fragments of conversation did not die away until the first grey streaks of dawn were visible over the heights of the far shore. I took a couple of aspirin and fell asleep when the pain behind my forehead began to ease off, like the darkness that drains from the sand as the water recedes after high tide.

August the 2nd was a peaceful day. I sat at a table near the open terrace door, my papers and notes spread out around me, drawing connections between events that lay far apart but which seemed to me to be of the same order. I wrote with an ease that astonished me. Line by line I filled the pages of the ruled notepad I had brought with me from home. Luciana, at work behind the bar, threw me repeated sideways glances, as if to check that I had not lost my thread. She also brought me an espresso and a glass of water at regular intervals, as I had requested, and from time to time a toasted sandwich wrapped in a paper napkin. Often she would stand beside me for a while, making a little conversation, her eyes wandering over the written pages. On one occasion she asked if I was a journalist or writer. When I said that neither the one nor the other was quite right, she asked what it was that I was working on, to which I replied that I did not know for certain myself, but had a growing suspicion that it might turn into a crime story, set in upper Italy, in Venice, Verona and Riva. The plot revolved around a series of unsolved murders and the reappearance of a person who had long been missing. Luciana asked whether Limone featured in the story too, and I said that not only Limone but indeed the hotel and herself would be part of it. At this she beat a hasty retreat behind the bar, where she continued her work with that absent-minded precision that was peculiarly hers. Now she would prepare a cappuccino or hot chocolate, now pour a beer or glass of wine or grenadine for one of the few hotel guests sitting on the terrace during the daytime. Occasionally she would make entries in a large ledger, her head inclined to one side, looking for all the world as if she were still at school. More and more frequently I felt impelled to look over towards her, and whenever our eyes met she laughed as if at some silly inadvertence. On the wall behind the bar, between the colourful, shiny rows of spirits bottles, there was a large mirror, so I was able to watch both Luciana and her reflection, which gave me a curious satisfaction.

Around midday the guests disappeared from the terrace, and Luciana too left her post. The writing was becoming increasingly difficult, and soon it all seemed to be the most meaningless, empty, dishonest scrawl. I was greatly relieved when Mauro appeared, bringing the newspapers I had asked him to get me. Most of them were English and French, but there were also two Italian papers, the Gazzettino and the Alto Adige. By the time I was reading the last of them, the Alto Adige, the afternoon was almost over. A breeze was stirring the sunshades on the terrace, the guests were gradually returning, and Luciana had long since been busy behind the bar again. For a long while I puzzled over an article the heading of which, Fedeli a Riva, seemed to me to suggest some dark mystery, though the piece was merely about a couple by the name of Hilse, from Lünen near Dortmund, who had spent their vacations on Lake Garda every year since 1957. However, in the arts section of the paper I came across a report which did have a special meaning for me. It was a brief preview of a play that was due to be performed the next day

in Bolzano. I had just finished reading this short article, underlining a thing or two, when Luciana brought me a Fernet. Once again she lingered, looking at the newspaper spread out before me. Una fantesca, I heard her say quietly, and I thought I felt her hand on my shoulder. It occurred to me then how few and far between in my life were the moments when I had been touched in this way by a woman with whom I was barely acquainted, and, thinking back, it seemed to me that about such unwonted gestures there had always been something disembodied and ghoulish, something that went quite through me! For example, I remember an occasion years ago, sitting in the darkened consulting room of a Manchester optometrist's and gazing through the lenses inserted into those strange eye-test frames at the letters in the illuminated box, which were in clear focus one moment, completely blurred the next. Beside me stood a Chinese optician whose name, so a small badge on her white overall told me, was Susi Ahoi. She said very little, but every time she leaned towards me to change the lenses I was aware of the cool aura of solicitude that surrounded her. Time and again she adjusted the heavy frame, and once she touched my temples, which as so often were throbbing with pain, with her fingertips, for rather longer than was necessary, I thought, though it was probably only in order to position my head better. Luciana's hand, which surely rested on my shoulder unintentionally, if it did so at all, as she leaned to take the espresso cup and the ashtray from the table, had a similar effect on me, and as on that distant occasion in Manchester I now suddenly saw everything out of focus, as if through lenses not made for my eyes.

On the following morning — I had decided to go over to Verona after all — it turned out that my passport, which Luciana had placed in a locker in the reception desk when I arrived, had gone astray. The girl who made up my bill, repeatedly stressing that she helped out at the hotel only in the mornings, rummaged in vain through all the drawers and compartments. At length she went to wake Mauro, who spent a quarter of an hour turning everything upside down and inside out and leafing through every one of the various passports kept at reception without finding mine, before fetching his mother down. Luciana gave me a long look when she appeared behind the desk, as if to say this was a fine way to take one's leave. Taking up the search for my lost passport, she said that the passports of all guests were kept in the same drawer, and not a single one had ever been mislaid since the hotel had been in existence. So the passport must be here in the drawer, and it was only a question of using one's eyes. But then, she told Mauro, he had never been any good at using his eyes, presumably because she, Luciana, had always used hers for him. Ever since he was small, if he couldn't find something right away — a schoolbook, his pencil case, his tennis racquet, his motorbike keys — he simply claimed it wasn't there, and whenever she, Luciana, had come to look, of course it tuas there. Mauro objected that she could say what she liked but this passport, at any rate, had vanished — spa-ri-to, he said, emphasising the individual syllables as if for someone hard of hearing. Il passaporto scomparso mocked Luciana. One remark led to another, and before long the argument started by my passport had escalated into a family drama. The padrone, too, whom till that moment I had not set eyes on and who was half a head shorter than Luciana, now arrived on the scene. Mauro told the entire story from the start, for the third time at least. The girl stood there without saying a word, continuously smoothing her pinafore with an embarrassed air. Luciana had turned away and, shaking her head and running her fingers through the curls in her hair, kept saying strano, strano, as if the disappearance of the passport, which could no longer be doubted, were the most extraordinary thing that had happened in all her life. The padrone, who had promptly embarked on a systematic search, placing all the Austrian, all the Dutch and all the German passports together, pushing the Austrian and Dutch ones aside with a definitive gesture, and examining the German ones closely, concluded from this operation that while my passport was indeed not among them, there was, in its stead so to speak, one which belonged to a certain Herr Doll who, if he remembered correctly, had left yesterday and must inadvertently have been given my passport — I still hear him calling out inavvertitamente, striking his forehead with the flat of his hand in despair at such negligence — and that this Herr Doll had simply pocketed my passport without checking whether it really was his own. Germans, declared the padrone, concluding his account of these incredible occurrences, were always in far too much of a hurry. Doubtless Herr Doll was now somewhere on the motorway, and my passport on his person. The question was now how I was to be provided with provisional papers proving my identity, in the absence of the passport, so that I could continue my journey and leave Italy. Mauro, who appeared to be responsible for the mix-up, apologised most profusely to me, while Luciana, who now took his side, ventured that after all he was still little more than a child. A child, exclaimed the padrone, casting his eyes up to heaven as though requiring support from that quarter in this hour in which his patience was sorely tried — a child, he exclaimed again, but this time to Mauro, a child he certainly is not, just mindless, and so, without the least regard, he compromises the good reputation of our hotel. What will the signore think of Limone and Italy when he departs, the padrone demanded of Mauro, pointing to me, and, with the question still hanging in the air as quasi-irrefutable proof of my discomfiture, he added that I must now be taken without delay to the police station, where the police chief, Dalmazio Orgiu, would issue me with papers which would at least be valid for leaving the country. I put in that I could obtain a new passport at the German consulate in Milan and that there was no need to go to any further lengths on my account, but the padrone had already pressed the car keys into his wife's hand, picked up my bag and taken my arm. Before I knew what was happening I was sitting beside Luciana in the blue Alfa and we were driving up the steep streets to the main road, where the police station stood somewhat set back behind tall iron railings. The brigadiere, who wore an immense Rolex watch on his left wrist and a heavy gold bracelet on the right, listened to our tale, sat down at a huge, old-fashioned typewriter with a carriage practically a metre across, put in a sheet of paper and, half murmuring and half singing the text as he typed, dashed off the following document, which he tore out of the rollers with a flourish the moment he had completed it and read it over once more for good measure, handing it

first to me, who was rendered speechless by this virtuoso performance, and then to Luciana for signature before endorsing it himself and, by way of completing the business, rubber-stamping it first with a circular and then with a rectangular stamp. When I asked the brigadiere if he were certain that the document he had drawn up would enable me to cross the border he replied, faintly irritated by the doubt implied in my question: Non siamo in Russia, signore.

When I was in the car with Luciana once again, the document in my hand, I felt as if we had just been married by the brigadiere and might now drive off together wherever we desired. But this notion, which filled me with intense pleasure, was short-lived, and once I had recovered my equilibrium I asked Luciana to drop me at the bus stop down the road. There I got out, and, my bag already slung over my shoulder, I exchanged a few more words with her through the open window of the car and belatedly wished her a happy forty-fourth birthday She beamed as if at an unexpected present. Then, her head slightly inclined, she said addio, engaged the gears, and drove off. The Alfa glided slowly down the street and vanished around a bend which seemed to me to lead to another world. It was already midday. The next bus was not due till three o'clock. I went into a bar near the bus stop, ordered an espresso, and soon became so deeply absorbed in recasting my notes that I have not the faintest recollection either of the hours of waiting or of the bus journey to Desenzano. Not until I am on the train to Milan do I become visible again to my mind's eye. Outside, in the slanting sunlight of late afternoon, the poplars and fields of Lombardy went by. Opposite me sat a Franciscan nun of about thirty or thirty-five and a young girl with a colourful patchwork jacket over her shoulders. The girl had got on at Brescia, while the nun had already been on the train at Desenzano. The nun was reading her breviary, and the girl, no less immersed, was reading a photo story. Both were consummately beautiful, both very much present and yet altogether elsewhere. I admired the profound seriousness with which each of them turned the pages. Now the Franciscan nun would turn a page over, now the girl in the colourful jacket, then the girl again and then the Franciscan nun once more. Thus the time passed without my ever being able to exchange a glance with either the one or the other. I therefore tried to practise a like modesty, and took out Der Beredte Italiener, a handbook published in 1878 in Berne, for all who wish to make speedy and assured progress in colloquial Italian. In this little booklet, which had belonged to a maternal great-uncle of

mine, who spent some time working as an office clerk in northern Italy towards the end of the last century, everything seemed arranged in the best of all possible ways, quite as though the world was made up purely of letters and words and as if, through this act of transformation, even the greatest of horrors were safely banished, as if to each dark side there were a redeeming counterpart, to every evil its good, to every pain its pleasure, and to every lie a measure of truth. Soon

the outlying districts of Milan came into view. Satellite developments with twenty-storey residential blocks. Then the suburbs, factory yards and older tenement buildings. The train changed to another track. The low rays of the setting sun passed through the compartment. The girl in the colourful jacket inserted a bookmark into her photo story, and the Franciscan sister also slipped a green ribbon into her breviary. Both now sat leaning back in the fullness of the evening glow, until at length we entered the darkness of the Central Station, and were all changed into amorphous shadows. As the train ground to a halt, the screeching of the brakes reached an excruciating pitch before it finally cut out and gave way to a moment of complete silence into which, almost at once, the heaving noise that prevailed under the great iron vaults flowed back. Filled by a sense of having been abandoned, I remained standing for a while on the platform. The girl in the many-coloured jacket and the Franciscan nun had long since disappeared. What connection could there be, I then wondered and now wonder again, between those two beautiful female readers and this immense railway terminus which, when it was built in 1932, outdid all other train stations in Europe; and what relation was there between the so-called monuments of the past and the vague longing, propagated through our bodies, to people the dust-blown expanses and tidal plains of the future. My bag slung over my shoulder, I strolled down the platform, the last of the passengers, and at a kiosk bought myself a map of the city. How many city maps have I not bought in my time? I always try to find reliable bearings at least in the space that surrounds me. The map of Milan I had purchased seemed a curiously apt choice, because while I was waiting for the quietly rumbling photo-booth where I had had some pictures taken to yield up the prints, I noticed on the front of the map's cardboard cover the black and white image of a labyrinth, and on the back an

affirmation that must seem promising and indeed auspicious for anyone who knows what it is to err on one's way:

I emerged from the station hall into the leaden evening air. Yellow taxis came drifting towards their rank from every quarter, only to set off once again with more weary home-comers in the back. I walked through the colonnades to the eastern side, the wrong side of the station. Under the archway that gives onto the Piazza Savoia was a Hertz advertisement bearing the words la prossima coincidenza. I was still gazing up at this message, thinking it might possibly be meant for me, when two young men, talking to each other in a state of great agitation, came straight at me. It was quite impossible to get out of their way: their breath was already upon my face, already I was seeing the knotty scar on the one's cheek and the veins in the other's eye and feeling their hands beneath my jacket, grabbing, tugging and pulling. Not until I turned on my heel and swung the bag off my shoulder into the pair of them did I manage to disengage myself and retreat to one of the pillars in the archway, la prossima coincidenza. None of the passers-by had taken any notice of the incident. I, however, watched my two assailants, jerking curiously as if they were out of an early motion picture, vanish in the half-light under the colonnades. In the taxi, I clutched my bag with both hands. To my remark that Milan was dangerous territory, ventured in as casual a tone as I could muster, the driver responded with a gesture of helplessness. His nearside window was protected by a metal grille, and he had a multi-coloured medallion of Our Lady on the dashboard. We drove along the Via N. Torriani, across the Piazza Cincinnato, turned left into the Via San Gregorio and left again into the Via Lodovico, and drew up outside the Hotel Boston, which looked an unprepossessing, ill-omened house. The driver took the fare without a word and the taxi vanished in the distance. Nowhere in all the Via Lodovico was there a living soul to be seen. I climbed the few steps to the unappealing hostelry and waited in the dimly lit hallway until the signora, a wizen-faced creature of some sixty or seventy years, appeared from the television room. Suspiciously she kept her beady eye on me while I explained, in my halting Italian, that I was unable to show any papers because my passport had gone astray and I was in Milan to obtain a new one from the German consulate. As soon as I had finished my sorry tale she called her husband, who answered to the name of Orlando and who now also emerged unsteadily from the television room, where he had languished, like the signora, in something of a stupor. He took what seemed an age to cross the small lobby and take up his position beside his wife behind the reception desk, which came up nearly to their shoulders. When I told my story all over again, it no longer sounded plausible, even to me. Half in pity and half in contempt I was at length handed an old iron key bearing the number 513. The room was right at the top, but the lift, a cramped and clattering metal cage, went only as far as the fourth floor, from where I had to climb up two back stairs. A long corridor, far too long for that narrow building, led past a row of doors barely more than two metres apart down a slight incline, as it seemed to me. Poor travellers, I thought, seeing myself among them: always somewhere else. The key turned in the lock. An oppressive heat that had been building up for days and perhaps even weeks hit me. I pulled up the blinds. There were rooftops as far as the eye could see in the gathering dusk, and a forest of aerials stirred faintly in a breeze. Below, a chasm of backyards yawned. I turned away from this view and without undressing lay down on the bed, which was covered with a fringed, floral-patterned, damask spread, folded my arms under my head, and stared up at the ceiling, which appeared to be miles away. Stray voices drifted up from below and came in at the open window. A cry, as from someone swept out to sea, a shrieking laugh in an empty theatre. Time passed and it grew gradually darker. Little by little, the sounds subsided and there was silence. Hours went by, never-ending hours, but rest eluded me. In the middle of the night, or it may even have been towards morning, I got up, undressed and climbed into the shower cabin, which jutted into the room and was concealed behind a mildewed plastic curtain. For a long while I let the water run down me. And then, wet as I was, I lay down again on the fringed bedspread and waited for dawn to touch the tips of the aerials. At last I thought I could make out the first glimmer, I heard the call of a blackbird and shut my eyes. A pulsating glow spread under my lowered lids. Ecco l'arcobaleno. Behold the rainbow in the heavens. Ecco l'arco celeste. Sleep came and I dreamed of a green field of corn and floating above it, with outstretched arms, a convent nun from my childhood, Sister Mauritia, quite as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

At nine next morning I was in the waiting room of the German consulate in the Via Solferino. At that early hour there were already a considerable number of travellers who had been robbed and people with other concerns, among them a family of artistes who seemed to me to belong to an era that ended at least half a century ago. The head of this small troupe — for that was undoubtedly what they were — was wearing a white summer suit and extremely elegant canvas shoes with a brown leather trim. In his hands he was twirling a broad-brimmed straw hat of exquisite form, now clockwise, now anticlockwise. From the precision of his movements one knew that preparing an omelette on the high-wire, that sensational trick performed by the legendary Blondel, would have been mere child's play for this grounded tightrope-walker whose true home, one felt, was the freedom of the air. Next to him sat a remarkably Nordic-looking young woman in a tailor-made suit, she too straight out of the 1930s. She sat quite still and bolt upright, her eyes shut the whole time. Not once did I see her glance up or notice the slightest twitch at the corners of her mouth. She held her head always in the same position and not a hair was out of place in her painstakingly crimped coiffure. With these two somnambulists, whose names proved to be Giorgio and Rosa Santini, there were three girls, all of about the same age, wearing summer frocks of the finest cambric, who resembled each other very closely. Now they would sit quietly, now wander about among the chairs and tables in the waiting room almost as if they were trying to make their meanderings into intricate, beautiful loops. One of them had a brightly coloured whirligig, one a collapsible telescope which she tended to hold to her eye the wrong way round, and the third a parasol. At times all three, with their sundry emblems, would sit at the window and gaze out at the Milanese morning, where the shimmering daylight was breaking through the heavy grey air. Sitting apart from the Santinis, though plainly with them, in her affections and by relation, was the nonna in a black silk dress. She was busy with crocheting and looked up only occasionally to cast what seemed to me a worried look at the silent couple or the three sisters. Although it took a long while until my identity had been established, by several phone calls to the relevant authorities in Germany and London, the time passed lightly in the company of these people. At length, a short, not to say dwarfish consular official settled himself on a sort of bar-stool behind an enormous typing machine in order to enter in dotted letters the details I had given concerning my person into a new passport. Emerging from the consulate building

with this newly issued proof of my freedom to come and go as I pleased in my pocket, I decided to take a stroll around the streets of Milan for an hour or so before travelling on, although of course I might have known that any idea of the kind, in a city so filled with the most appalling traffic, will end in aimless wandering and bouts of distress. On that day, the 4th of August, 1987,1 walked down the Via Moscova, past San Angelo, through the Giardini Pubblici, along the Via Palestro, the Via Marina, the Via Senato, the Via della Spiga, the Via Gesù, into the Via Monte Napoleone and the Via Alessandro Manzoni, by way of which I finally reached the Piazza della Scala, from where I crossed to the cathedral square. Inside the cathedral I sat down for a while, untied my shoe-laces, and, as I still remember with undiminished clarity, all of a sudden no longer had any knowledge of where I was. Despite a great effort to account for the last few days and how I had come to be in this place, I was unable even to determine whether I was in the land of the living or already in another place. Nor did this lapse of memory improve in the slightest after I climbed to the topmost gallery of the cathedral and from there, beset by recurring fits of vertigo, gazed out upon the dusky, hazy panorama of a city now altogether alien to me. Where the word "Milan" ought to have appeared in my mind there was nothing but a painful, inane reflex. A menacing reflection of the darkness spreading within me loomed up in the west where an immense bank of cloud covered half the sky and cast its shadow on the seemingly endless sea of houses. A stiff wind came up, and I had to brace myself so that I could look down to where the people were crossing the piazza, their bodies inclined forwards at an odd angle, as though they were hastening towards their doom — a spectacle which brought back to me an epitaph I had seen years before on a tombstone in the Piedmont. And as I remembered the words Se il vento s'alza, Correte, Correte! Se il vento s'alza, non v'arrestate! so I knew, in that instant, that the figures hurrying over the cobbles below were none other than the men and women of Milan.

That evening I was on my way to Verona once again. The train raced through the dark countryside at an alarming speed. This time I alighted at my destination without a second thought and, once I had had a double Fernet in the station bar and browsed through the Verona newspapers, I took a taxi to the Golden Dove, where, contrary to all expectation, at the height of the season, a room perfectly suited to my needs was made available and where I was treated with exquisite courtesy, both by the porter, who reminded me of Ferdinand Bruckner, and by the hotel manageress, who seemed to be waiting in the foyer for the express purpose of welcoming me as a long expected guest of honour who had finally arrived. Rather than asking for my passport, she simply handed me the register, and I entered my name as Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer, historian, of Landeck, Tyrol. The porter picked up my bag and preceded me to the room, where I gave him a tip that far exceeded my means, at which he left with a deep bow. That night under the roof of the Golden Dove, I felt safe as if under the wing of a bird whose plumage I saw in the finest shades of brown and brick-red, a well-nigh miraculous reprieve, as was the breakfast next morning, which I recall as a very dignified occasion. Confidently, as if from now on I could not put a foot wrong, I set off shortly before ten through the city streets, and soon found myself outside the Biblioteca Civica, where I proposed to spend the day working. A notice on the main entrance advised the public that the library was closed during the holiday period, but the door stood ajar. Inside, it was so gloomy that at first I had to feel my way forwards. In vain I tried a number of door handles, all of which seemed curiously high to me, before at last I found one of the librarians in a reading room flooded with the mild light of the early morning. He was an old gentleman with carefully trimmed hair and beard, who had just settled down to the days task behind his desk. He wore black satin armlets and gold-rimmed half-moon spectacles, and was ruling lines on one sheet of paper after another. Once he had prepared a batch, he looked up from the business in hand and enquired what it was I had come for. Having listened to my protracted explanation, he went to fetch what I wanted and before long I was sitting near one of the windows leafing through the folio volumes in which the Verona newspapers dating from August and September 1913 were bound. The edges were by now so brittle that the pages needed to be turned with much care. All manner of silent movie scenes began to be enacted before my eyes. In Via Alberto Mario I beheld divers gentlemen walking up and down and, at the very moment they supposed themselves unobserved, deftly side-stepping, with lightning alacrity, into the doorway of the building that housed the establishment of Dr Ringger, graduate of the medical schools of Paris and Vienna. Each of the many chambers within was

already occupied by an impeccably suited gentleman of the sort that continued to leap in from the street, while Dr Ringger, for his part, was to be seen in the great salon on the mezzanine floor perusing, in preparation for his surgery hours, a range of outsize pictorial reproductions of the inflorescences caused by diseases of the skin, spread out before him on a huge table like the multi-coloured ordnance maps at a war council of the general staff. And then I witnessed Dr Pesavento, whose practice was in the Via Stella, not far from the Biblioteca Civica, performing one of his painless

extractions. The pale countenance of the patient under Dr Pesavento did indeed seem perfectly relaxed, but her body twisted and turned in the dentist's chair as if she were undergoing the most agonising discomforts. There were revelations of a different kind, too, such as the pyramid of ten million bottles of Ferro-China table water (to reconstitute the blood), gleaming and glinting in the sun like a promise of eternal

life: a lion roared soundlessly, and soundlessly the pyramid shattered into a myriad little pieces tumbling down slowly in a crystal cascade. They were soundless and weightless, these images and words of times gone by, flaring up briefly and instantly going out, each of them its own empty enigma. The Tyrolese missionary Giuseppe Ohrwalder was reported from Khartoum to have been missing for several weeks at Omdurman in the Sudan. According to telegrams from Danzig, a Colonnello Stern of the 6th Field Artillery Regiment had been arrested there on suspicion of spying: stories with neither beginning nor end, I reflected, which ought to be looked into more closely. 1913 was a peculiar year. The times were changing, and the spark was racing along the fuse like an adder through the grass. Everywhere there were great effusions of feeling. The people were trying out a new role. The sacred and righteous wrath of the nation was invoked. The accounts in the Veronese newspapers of the first festival in the anfiteatro romano sought to surpass each other in their enthusiasm. According to one of my notes, an article in the Fedele was entitled Apoteosi dei titani, in Gothic type. It concluded with the assurance that this headline was no hollow assertion, since the arena was a titanic example of Roman architecture and Giuseppe Verdi the Titan of the melopoea italiana. The true Titan of all art and beauty, however, the writer proclaimed with a final flourish, was il popolo nostro, and all the rest were nothing but pygmies. For a long time my eyes remained fixed on the six letters of the word pigmei, the announcement of a destruction that had already taken place. It was as if I could hear the voice of the people, as it welled up, the violent inflection in the syllables: pig-me-i, pig-me-i, pig-me-i. The shouting roared within my ear, in reality doubtless the drumming of my own blood, amplified and distorted by my imagination. At all events, it seemed to prompt no response in the librarian. Calmly he sat bent over his work, filling the lines he had ruled with an even hand. The manner in which he paused at the end of every line suggested that he was writing a list. And plainly he had every detail he needed for the composition of this visibly lengthening register in his head, for he continued his writing without ever referring to any source. Our eyes met on one occasion when he had completed another page and looked up from his work as he reached for the tin that contained the blotting sand. That gesture, which was so out of time, seemed so wholly right at that moment, and so meaningful, that, reassured, I was able to continue my trail through the papers, and as I went on reading and turning the pages, well into the afternoon, I happened on one thing or another that might well be worth retelling some time, such as the report headed ucciso sul banco anatomico, which began with the truly novelistic words: Ieri sera nella cella mortuaria de cimitero di Nogara, and which dealt with the murder of a carabiniere named Muzio. The story, which did not lack gruesome details, remained in my memory not least because in one of the tomes I was going through I found an old postcard showing the Cimitero di Staglieno in Genoa. I pocketed the picture and subsequently examined every square inch of it through a magnifying glass. The pale light over the dark hills, the viaduct which appears to lead out of the picture and into a tunnel, the deep shadows near it, the numerous tombs in the shapes of towers or pagodas to the right, the cypress grove, the perspective alignment of the walls, the black field in the foreground, and the white villa at the left end of the main colonnaded walk, all of this, particularly the white villa, seemed so familiar to me that I could easily have found my way around that site blindfolded. In the latter part of the

afternoon I walked along the Adige, beneath the trees of the riverside promenade, to the Castelvecchio. A sandy-coloured dog with a black mark like a patch over its left eye, that appeared like all stray dogs to run at an angle to the direction it was moving in, had attached itself to me outside the duomo, and now kept a steady distance ahead of me. If I paused to gaze down at the river, it paused as well and looked pensively at the flowing water. If I continued on my way, it too went on. But when I crossed the Corso Cavour by the Castelvecchio, it remained on the curb, and when I turned in the middle of the Corso to see where it was I narrowly escaped being run over. Once I was on the other side I wondered whether I should carry straight on through the Via Roma to the Piazza Bra, where I was meeting Salvatore Altamura, or should instead make the short detour through the Via San Silvestro and the Via dei Mutilati. All at once the dog, which had kept its eyes on me from the other side of the Corso, was gone, and so I turned down the Via Roma. I took my time, drifting along with the tide of people in the street, going into this shop and that and at length found myself opposite the Pizzeria Verona, from which I had fled headlong that November evening seven years before. The lettering over Carlo Cadavero's restaurant was still the same, but the entrance was boarded up, and the blinds on the upper floors were drawn, much as I had expected, as I realised in that instant. The image that had lodged in my mind when I fled Verona, and which had recurred time after time, with extreme clarity, before I was at last able to forget it, now presented itself to me again, strangely distorted — two men in black silver-buttoned tunics, who were carrying out from a rear courtyard a bier on which lay, under a floral-patterned drape, what was plainly the body of a human being. Whether this dark apparition was superimposed on reality for a mere moment or for much longer, I could not have said when my senses returned to the daylight and the people, quite unconcerned, passing the pizzeria, which had evidently been shut for some time. When I asked the photographer in the shop next door why the business had closed down, he was unwilling to say anything, nor could I persuade him to photograph the front of the building for me. To my questions and requests he merely responded by shaking his head, as if he did not understand me or was unable to speak. As I was turning to leave, imagining this deaf mute photographer at work in his dark room, I heard him utter a screed of savage curses behind my back, curses which seemed directed less at myself than at some incident which had happened in the restaurant next door. Out on the pavement I wandered irresolutely to and fro before at length I approached a passer-by who seemed suitable for my purpose, a young tourist who came from the Erlangen area, and asked him to take a photograph of the pizzeria for me, which he did, after some hesitation and after I had given him a ten mark note to cover the cost of sending the picture to England in due course. When,

however, I added an urgent request to photograph the flock of pigeons that had just flown from the piazza into the Via Roma, and had settled on the balcony rail and the roof of the building, the young Erlanger, who, as I now thought, might have been on honeymoon, was not prepared to oblige me a second time, probably, I suspected, because his newly-wed bride, who had been eyeing me the whole time with a distrusting and even hostile air and had not budged from his side even when he was taking the picture, was plucking impatiently at his sleeve.

When I arrived at the piazza, Salvatore was already sitting reading outside the bar with the green awning, his glasses pushed up onto his forehead and holding the book so close to his face that it was quite impossible to believe he could decipher anything at all. Taking care not to disturb him, I sat down. The book he was reading had a pink dust jacket bearing the portrait of a woman, in dark colours. Below the portrait, in lieu of a title, were the numbers ipi2+i. A waiter came to the table. He was wearing a long green apron. I ordered a double Fernet on the rocks. Salvatore had meanwhile laid his book aside and restored his glasses to their proper place. He explained apologetically that in the early evening when he had at last escaped the pressures of the daily round he would always turn to a book, even if he had left his reading glasses in the office, as he had today. Once I am at leisure, said Salvatore, I take refuge in prose as one might in a boat. All day long I am surrounded by the clamour on the editorial floor, but in the evening I cross over to an island, and every time, the moment I read the first sentences, it is as if I were rowing far out on the water. It is thanks to my evening reading alone that I am still more or less sane. He was sorry he had not noticed me right away, he said, but being short-sighted and also absorbed in Sciascias story had cut him off almost completely from what was going on around him. The story Sciascia was telling, he continued, as it were returning to the real world, was a fascinating synopsis of the years immediately before the First World War. At the centre of the narrative, which was more like an essay in form, was one Maria Oggioni nata Tiepolo, wife of a Capitano Ferrucio Oggioni, who on the 8th of November, 1912, shot her husband's batman, a bersagliere by the name of Quintilio Polimanti, in self-defence according to her own statement. At the time the newspapers naturally made a meal of the story, and the trial, which gripped the nation's imagination for weeks — since after all the accused was of the famous Venetian painter's family, as the press tirelessly repeated — this trial, which kept the entire nation on the edge of its seat, finally revealed no more than a truth familiar to everyone: that the law is not equal for all, and justice not just. Since Polimanti was no longer able to speak for himself, Signora Oggioni, whom everyone was soon calling Contessa Tiepolo, found it easy to win over the judges with that enigmatic smile of hers, a smile that promptly reminded journalists of the Mona Lisa's, as one can imagine, the more so since in 1913 La Gioconda was also in the headlines, having been discovered under the bed of a Florentine workman who had liberated her from her exile in the Louvre two years before and returned her to her native country. It is curious to observe, added Salvatore, how in that year everything was moving towards a single point, at which something would have to happen, whatever the cost. But you, he went on, were interested in a quite different story. And that story, to tell you the end of it first, has now almost reached its conclusion. The trial has been held. The verdict was thirty years. The appeal is due to be heard in Venice in the autumn. I do not think we can expect any new developments. Recently on the phone you said that you were more or less familiar with the story up to the autumn of 1980. The series of ghastly crimes continued after that time. That same autumn in Vicenza, a prostitute by the name of Maria Alice Beretta was killed with a hammer and an axe. Six months later, Luca Martinotti, a grammar school pupil from Verona, succumbed to injuries sustained when an Austrian casemate on the banks of the Etsch, used as a shelter by drug addicts, was torched. In July 1982, two monks, Mario Lovato and Giovanni Pigato, both of advanced years, on their customary walk of an evening round the quiet streets near their monastery, had their skulls smashed in with a heavy-duty hammer. After that killing, a Milan news agency received a letter from the Organizzazione Ludwig, which had already claimed responsibility for the crimes in the autumn of 1980, as you know. If I remember correctly, in the second letter the group claimed that their purpose in life was to destroy those who had betrayed God. In February, the body of a priest, Armando Bison, was found in the Trentino. He lay bludgeoned in his own blood, and a crucifix had been driven into the back of his neck. A further letter proclaimed that the power of Ludwig knew no bounds. In mid-May of the same year, a cinema in Milan, which showed pornographic films, went up in flames. Six men died. Their last picture show bore the title Lyla, profumo di femmina. The group claimed responsibility for what they described as a blazing pyre of pricks. In early 1984, on the day after Epiphany, a further arson attack, which also remained unsolved, was made on a discotheque near Munich's main station. It was not until two weeks later that Furlan and

Abel were apprehended. Wearing clowns' costumes, they were carrying open petrol canisters in perforated sports bags through the Melamare disco at Castiglione delle Stiviere, not far from the southern shore of Lake Garda, where that evening four hundred young people had come together for the carnival. It was only by a hair's breadth that the two escaped being lynched by the crowd on the spot. So much for the principal points of the story. Apart from providing irrefutable evidence, the investigation produced nothing that might have made it possible to comprehend a series of crimes extending over almost seven years. Nor did the psychiatric reports afford any real insight into the inner world of the two young men. Both were from highly respected families. Furlan's father is a well-known specialist in burn injuries, and consultant in the plastic surgery department at the hospital here. Abel's father is a retired lawyer, from Germany, who was head of the Verona branch of a Dusseldorf insurance company for years. Both sons went to the Girolamo Fracastro grammar school. Both were highly intelligent. After the school-leaving examinations, Abel went on to study maths and Furlan chemistry. Beyond that, there is little to be said. I think they were like brothers to each other and had no idea how to free themselves from their innocence. I once saw Abel, who was an outstanding guitar player, on a television programme. I think it was in the mid-1970s. He would have been fifteen or sixteen then. And I remember that his whole appearance and his wonderful playing affected me deeply.

Salvatore had come to the end of his account, and night had fallen. Crowds of festival-goers released from their tour buses were gathered outside the arena. The opera, said Salvatore, is not what it used to be. The audience no longer understand that they are part of the occasion. In the old days the carriages used to drive down the long wide road to the Porta Nuova in the evenings, out through the gateway, and westward under the trees along the glacis, skirting the city, till nightfall. Then everyone turned back. Some drove to the churches for the "Ave Maria della Sera", some stopped here on the Bra and the gentlemen stepped up to the carriages to converse with the ladies, often till well into the dark. The days of stepping up to a carriage are over, and the days of the opera also. The festival is a travesty. That is why I cannot bring myself to go into the arena on an evening liKe this, despite the fact that opera, as you are aware, means a great deal to me. For more than thirty years, said Salvatore I have been working in this city, and not once have I seen a production in the arena. I sit out here on the Bra, where you cannot hear the music. Neither the orchestra nor the choir nor the soloists. Not a sound. I listen, as it were, to a soundless opera. La spettacolosa Aida, a fantastic night on the Nile, as a silent film from the days before the Great War. Did you know, Salvatore continued, that the sets and costumes for the Aida being performed in the arena today are exact replicas of those designed by Ettore Fagiuoli and Auguste Mariette for the inauguration of the festival in 1913? One might suppose no time had passed at all, though in fact history is now nearing its close. At times it really does seem to me as if the whole of society were still in the Cairo opera house to celebrate the inexorable advance of Progress. Christmas Eve, 1871. For the first time the strains of the Aida overture are heard. With every bar, the incline of the stalls becomes a fraction steeper. The first ship glides through the Suez Canal. On the bridge stands a motionless figure in the white uniform of an admiral, observing the desert through a telescope. You will see the forests again, is Amanoroso's promise. Did you also know that in Scipio's day it was still possible to travel from Egypt to Morocco under the shade of trees? The shade of trees! And now, fire breaks out in the opera house. A crackling conflagration. With a crash the seats in the stalls, together with all their occupants, vanish into the orchestra pit. Through the swathes of smoke beneath the ceiling an unfamiliar figure comes floating down. Di morte l'angelo a noi s'appressa. Già veggo il ciel discindersi. But I digress. With these words, Salvatore stood up. You know how I am, he said as he took his leave, when it is getting late. I for my part, however, remained on the piazza for a long time with that image of the descending angel before my eyes. It must have been after midnight, and

the waiter in the green apron had just made his last rounds, when I imagined I heard a horse's hooves on the cobbled square and the sound of carriage wheels; but the carriage itself did not materialise. Instead, there came to my mind pictures of an open-air performance of Aida that I had seen in Augsburg as a boy, accompanied by my mother, and of which hitherto I had not had the slightest recollection. The triumphal procession, consisting of a paltry contingent of horsemen and a few sorrow-worn camels and elephants on loan from Circus Krone, as I have recently discovered, passed before me several times, quite as if it had never been forgotten, and, much as it had then in my boyhood, lulled me into a deep sleep from which — though to this day I cannot really explain how — I did not awake till the morning after, in my room at the Golden Dove.

By way of a postscript, I should perhaps add that in April 1924 the writer Franz Werfel visited his friend Franz Kafka

in Hajek's laryngological clinic in Vienna, bearing a bunch of roses and a copy of his newly published and universally acclaimed novel, with a personal dedication. The patient, who at this point weighed a mere 45 kilograms and was shortly to make his final journey to a private nursing home at Klosterneuburg, was probably no longer able to read the book, which may not have been the greatest loss he had to bear. That at least was my own feeling when I leafed

through this operatic tale a few months ago. For me, the only remarkable thing about it was the fact that the copy that had come into my hands, by a circuitous route, had in it the ex libris plate of one Dr Hermann Samson, who must have loved Aida so dearly that he had chosen the pyramids, monuments of death, as his insignia.